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Prae: Vol. 1
Considered an eerie attack on realism, when first published in 1934, Miklós Szentkuthy’s debut novel Prae so astonished Hungarian critics that many deemed it monstrous, derogatorily referred to Szentkuthy as cosmopolitan, and classified him alien to Hungarian culture.
Incomparable and unprecedented in Hungarian literature, Prae compels recognition as a serious contribution to modernist fiction, as ambitious in its aspirations as Ulysses or À la recherche du temps perdu. With no traditional narration and no psychologically motivated characters, in playing with voices, temporality, and events, while fiction, Prae is more what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy (à la Lucian, Rabelais, & Burton) or Menippean satire: the basic concern of the book is intellectual, its pervading mood is that of a comedy of ideas. As a virtual novel that preempts every possibility for its realization, it is a novel but only virtually so, a book which is actually a prae-paration for an unwritten (unwritable) novel. In this, it maintains the freedom and openness of its potentialities, indicative for instance in the Non-Prae diagonals, a series of passages that intercut the novel and continually fracture space and time to engage in what one of the figures of the book calls the culture of wordplay or dogmatic accidentalism. “The book’s title,” said Szentkuthy, “alludes to it being an overture. A multitude of thoughts, emotions, ideas, fantasies, and motifs that mill and churn as chimes, an overture to my subsequent oeuvre.”
By challenging the then prevailing dogmas and conventions of prose writing, Szentkuthy was said to have created a new canon for himself but later derided as insignificant for supposedly not acquiring followers.
Largely unread at the time, Prae eventually gained cult status and would be reprinted in 1980 and 2004. To some critics, the book is not only one of the representative experimental works of the early 20th century, but in its attempt to bring ‘impossible literature’ into being, it also presages the nouveau roman by almost 30 years. And in its rejection of sequentiality and celebration of narrative shuffling, long before Burroughs & Gysin, Prae enacts what is conceptually akin to the cut-up. Few of Szentkuthy’s contemporaries would reveal with equal bravura and audacity the new horizons that were opened up for narrative forms after the era of realism.
In Frivolities & Confessions, Szentkuthy said that his goal with Prae was “to absorb the problems of modern philosophy and mathematics into modern fashion, love, and every manifestation of life.” Translated for the first time since its original publication in 1934, upon its 80th anniversary, this legendary and controversial Hungarian modernist novel is now at last available in English.
Incomparable and unprecedented in Hungarian literature, Prae compels recognition as a serious contribution to modernist fiction, as ambitious in its aspirations as Ulysses or À la recherche du temps perdu. With no traditional narration and no psychologically motivated characters, in playing with voices, temporality, and events, while fiction, Prae is more what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy (à la Lucian, Rabelais, & Burton) or Menippean satire: the basic concern of the book is intellectual, its pervading mood is that of a comedy of ideas. As a virtual novel that preempts every possibility for its realization, it is a novel but only virtually so, a book which is actually a prae-paration for an unwritten (unwritable) novel. In this, it maintains the freedom and openness of its potentialities, indicative for instance in the Non-Prae diagonals, a series of passages that intercut the novel and continually fracture space and time to engage in what one of the figures of the book calls the culture of wordplay or dogmatic accidentalism. “The book’s title,” said Szentkuthy, “alludes to it being an overture. A multitude of thoughts, emotions, ideas, fantasies, and motifs that mill and churn as chimes, an overture to my subsequent oeuvre.”
By challenging the then prevailing dogmas and conventions of prose writing, Szentkuthy was said to have created a new canon for himself but later derided as insignificant for supposedly not acquiring followers.
Largely unread at the time, Prae eventually gained cult status and would be reprinted in 1980 and 2004. To some critics, the book is not only one of the representative experimental works of the early 20th century, but in its attempt to bring ‘impossible literature’ into being, it also presages the nouveau roman by almost 30 years. And in its rejection of sequentiality and celebration of narrative shuffling, long before Burroughs & Gysin, Prae enacts what is conceptually akin to the cut-up. Few of Szentkuthy’s contemporaries would reveal with equal bravura and audacity the new horizons that were opened up for narrative forms after the era of realism.
In Frivolities & Confessions, Szentkuthy said that his goal with Prae was “to absorb the problems of modern philosophy and mathematics into modern fashion, love, and every manifestation of life.” Translated for the first time since its original publication in 1934, upon its 80th anniversary, this legendary and controversial Hungarian modernist novel is now at last available in English.
788 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
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January 3, 2021
There are certain works of Art which, though flawed, remain high-points of human achievement. Where one is attempting to write a truly novel novel, the chances of failure are high, but, I believe, much can also be forgiven.
I simply cannot situate this text. It is unlike anything else I have read, though the vast majority of its constituent elements may be familiar. I can imagine you hating it, and I can imagine you loving it.
Some very helpful scene-setting and handy guides to what in the hell is going on (should you want them - tethered or untethered, that is the question) can be found here
http://contramundum.net/assets/hfa_7....
and here
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/h...
There is also the excellent Quarterly Conversation piece:
http://quarterlyconversation.com/read...
Some names mentioned in the text and in discussions/academia around the text to further help situate you:
Heidegger (there are certainly some satires of Mr H, but relatively affectionate ones I think - "Sich-vorweg-im-schon-sein-in" etc)
Husserl
Kant
Bergson (key, I think)
Joyce (though it bears almost no similarity to any of his work - the comparison to Ulysses is simply incorrect)
Proust
Musil
Paracelsus
Cortázar
Rabelais
Burton (it is most certainly an Anatomy of some sort)
Hegel (he does some Hegel jokes, at least I think they are jokes - my Hegel knowledge is too limited to know for sure)
This is one of the great novels about impossibility – the failure of words which stand between mind and world, the failure of philosophical thought to reach a totality, the failure of a novel to be complete, to be fully realised. It is also about what can still be achieved despite such limitation.
It is extraordinarily erudite, yet mocks its own learning. Genuine philosophical investigation sits side by side (sometimes in the same sentence) with its satire. It is funny, confusing, frustrating, exhilarating, beautiful and barking mad.
It is most certainly unique - I have never read anything that does what it does. However, as this is only part 1, I will leave a proper review and analysis until I have read part 2....And, as may be gleaned from the above, it has left me rather unsure of myself...
Here is a quote which sets out much of the "point" of this book:
If the title of this writing as a whole is Prae, does Prae say anything about what it wants? No, it does not. It does not even come anywhere close to itself. The same thing happens here as with the apprehensively penitent: as they pronounce the name of the sin, its place, the number of times, they immediately feel it is untruthful, so unaccustomed is the limited atmosphere of the “truth” after the infinitely extended nothingness of “life.” [...]
“Life is inexpressible”—for everyone that is an intolerable commonplace. But the massive concreteness of the “inexpressibility” can be expressed, and a form of expression of this kind, it so happens, would be the polar opposite of a commonplace, because never yet has it been done radically. Running behind the text of Prae, beside it and around it, is an organic accompanying stream, the “Non-Prae,” inseparable from Prae, which, unlike the temporary episodes of the above-mentioned oscillator, is a finite counterpart, complement, fellow balance-pan, or metaphorical arc of commentary to Prae. What exists, which is to say Prae itself, is a continual blunder, institutionalized prevarication [“truths”]; what is truly exciting, interesting, the one true faith or the actual, by its very nature lies outside any epic, and that is the inaccessible, the “Non-Prae,” which bears the same relation to Prae as a tautened bow string does to the arched shaft of the bow. On statues of Eros the figure of Eros is sometimes shown holding a marble bow; this has no bowstring, to be sure, but the bow is nevertheless arched in such a way that the viewer cannot fail to imagine the non-existent string as being there. In the figure of Prae there must, therefore, be some sort of positive signal from which the tensile strength of the “Non-Prae” that is constantly running in coexistence with Prae can be made perceptible, deducible. Principle: to utilize the essential impotence of literature with productive optimism as a useful structural factor: to make the constant ghostly absence and its continuo of otherness a harmonious component, to incorporate the “Non-Prae” into a work’s preserve in much the same way as in the Pantheon there also used to be an altar to the “unknown gods.”
"Non-Prae" is, in part, subjective experience, in case that is unclear (as that quote is taken from a much longer section which goes into things in more depth).
If you are interested, there are a lot more quotes in my updates.
Here is a little from an interview with the author in later years, which will again help with situating the text. I am not certain how much we can trust what he says, however:
Miklós Szentkuthy: Prae, my first novel, appeared in 1934. As to all the things that went into Prae, what inspired it, I already set that out with my accustomed terseness on the jacket blurb of the second edition, but what the hell, I’ll summarize it again — maybe expand on it a bit. I’ll recall a few of the subjects and books which, taken together, can be conceived as an imaginary Prae library of commentary on Prae.
During my university years, I read the German existentialist philosophers whom I… caricatured! let’s say. Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, and what have you. So I had a good chuckle at those who supposed (still suppose) that I am rooted in German philosophy of that kind. Quite the reverse: I was parodying real-life existentialist philosophers (and some I made up).
For instance, I invented the title of one of those philosophical works: Einleitung in die reine Undheit (‘An Introduction to Pure And-ness’). Dollykins is making herself known. Let’s hear what she has to say.
Dóra Szentkuthy: Someone from Paris paid us a visit and asked where the work Reine Undheit was to be found in the philosophical literature.
Miklós Szentkuthy: Oh, indeed! When the periodical Magyar Műhely produced a Szentkuthy issue, one of their staff paid me a visit. He said that he had searched in libraries for works that I had actually invented. Antal Szerb was aware of that, and in the review that he wrote for the journal Erdélyi Helikon after Prae appeared, he mentioned with a titter that Prae was full of quotations and titles taken from books of learning — strictly non-existent ones, of course.
(I took my readings in philosophy further, in the mid-Thirties, and I will speak about that later on when we get to it.)
When I wrote Prae I had already read Proust (I mentioned the circumstances: the Palatinus baths, sand, the exciting sight of women in swimming costumes…). He had demonstrable influence here and there. I am a hypersuperultraimpressionist, and instead of writing short stories, essays, small-scale and grand drama, aphorisms, fragments of memoirs, short novels, etc., out of my fantasies: I had always wanted to weave the fantastic thoughts and thousand impressions of my ‘Proust trauma’ of 1926 into the composition of a single giant work (the spur from the point of view of a ‘giant composition’ was Curtius’s Balzac monograph — I have already mentioned, in talking about my final years at grammar school — what an extraordinary influence it had on me).
À la recherche du temps perdu did not become my model through its analysis of psychological hypershading (though it is no slouch at that), but as a cathédrale des cathédrales: the literary counterpart of Reims and Amiens. I also read my way through almost all of Freud’s works, but their effect on Prae can be found at best only in traces.
I should note in passing that Proustian psychological portrayal and Freudian psychoanalysis have nothing at all in common! Many superficial people ignore that in putting Proust and Freud in the same pigeonhole.
In Proust there is no question of raising things from a ‘subconscious.’ Quite the contrary — that is, perhaps, a most characteristically French literary tradition anyway! — it is a matter of the clearest analysis of emotions and thought processes taking place at the top tier of the soul, in an almost ecstatically conscious knowledge of consciousness (worthy of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode). But whether Proust or Freud I was later bored rigid with all the psychologizing, and it was at this point that I was attracted to puppet-style representation, to puppet theater. Already in Prae, one of the protagonists edits a periodical named Antipsyche, which is not a negation of the psyche from a fun-fair materialist point of view but a counter to the great many exaggerated portrayals of the psyche in literature. To say nothing of what I frequently discussed with the psychiatrists and psychologists among my friends: the reason I became disenchanted with psychological portrayals is that my reading made it clear to me that, compared to the physiologically most complicated complex of the human body, the components of psychological life proceeded on a simpler scheme. People are disheartened in thinking how complicated the inner workings of psychological states and behaviors are; how complex, how paradoxical, how ambivalent. Really? One could count off the number of constituents on the fingers of both hands.
Our physical existence, our skin, our bones, our nerves, our bone marrow — now they are hypercomplex. To a non-medical person, those are all totally baffling: what are the physiological components that control even the tiniest movements we make? Call him Doctor Ignoramus Supremus, Creator Admiramus Ultimus, or God: he created our hypercomplicated organisms, the pituitary gland, hormones, biochemistry, respiration, the immune system — they evolved over millions of years to become what they are. That big apparatus, that hypercomplexity, in order that I should be able to take a book in my hand, eat a slice of bread, caress a woman, fall ill from time to time, and die? What’s this? What’s this about? That is why I’m in the habit of saying that my life and thought have two underlying motifs — ignorance and wonderment.
That is even more glaring in the case of animals. Even the simplest living beings are hypercomplicated, and we are continually discovering ever-newer physiological refinements within them. They eat, kill, preserve, race, perish. Is that the reason for this complicated organism? That untrackable physiology? Of course, the big difference is that the manifold constituents of our physical being are unknown to us, but our body — there’s no getting away from it — lives its own particular life regardless of us. On the other hand, we seem to be able to control matters of the psyche, ‘be sensible of them,’ and therefore they seem more complex.
That was merely a simile on my part to the effect that the ‘most complicated’ of the refined Freudian morsels of psychological life is paltry as compared to the constitution of our complicated body.
What of it? It was one of the reasons for my swinging away somewhat from psychology and for that protagonist in Prae starting the periodical Antipsyche. I took a strong liking to the representation of puppets.
Further inspiration for Prae:
At the time I wrote it, in 1928–1932, between the ages of 20 and 24, I was studying at a university. That is also the time to which my friendships with Gábor Halász and Antal Szerb date; in 1928 I made a big tour of Europe with my father, while in 1931 there was a one-year scholarship to study in England, my honeymoon, and more detailed perambulations in Europe. [.....]
So, the traveling in 1928 gave me the first impetus to write Prae. I set about as soon as I got back home, and the writing went largely in parallel to my dissertation on Ben Jonson.
The second big impetus was the European tour I made with Dolly in 1931–32.
My reading included Aldous Huxley, whose intellectualism both excited and attracted me (typically, the English were not too fond of him because he was — how should I put it? — a ‘continental’ style intellectual, alien to the British).
My reading also included: in French literature, Giraudoux, whose magical metaphors, similes, and games were likewise terribly appealing. Mauriac — his Catholicism, Jansenism, morality, and serious somberness had a big effect on me. Paul Valéry, whose, on the one hand, extraordinarily refined, hyperanalytical aphorisms and, on the other hand, poems imbued with the idea of ‘poésie pure’ were also fascinating. That was not, however, to point out that all of these were sucked up into Prae: they simply interested me.
I read Joyce in 1931; I’ve already related the circumstances in which I did, so here let me just note that the essence of the Joyce connection was his most minute observation of the most mundane reality and, at the same time, the most pyrotechnical mythological games — that duality is flesh and blood to my own psyche and nature: hypernaturalism and simultaneously a luxuriance of fantasy.
Joyce’s mental world was profoundly kindred to my own. Prae and Ulysses cannot be compared to Finnegans Wake. Our works are as distant from each other as Makó from Jerusalem, but in many respects their mental worlds are akin. It seems to be an exciting and amusing psychological law: the derivation of the simplest veristic observation and apocalyptic Bosch fantasy from one and the same root — Flaubert! Flaubert!
With regard to the style and stock of similes in Prae, the strongest influence was not Proust or even Joyce, but — my mathematical studies.
At that time I read countless books on modern physics and mathematics. Back then quantum theory was still a novelty, and I built up a whole little library of books on that. To mention just a few of them: Planck’s fundamental essay on quantum mechanics; the papers by Heisenberg and de Broglie on the uncertainty principle and wave mechanics, and Einstein’s short dissertation on the method of theoretical physics — for me those were great treasures in the early Thirties. It was around that time that I also read the marvelous books by Eddington on the physical world: The Nature of the Physical World and The Expanding Universe, and I read Jeans’ book on astronomy: The Mysterious Universe."
http://www.hlo.hu/news/frivolities_an...
I simply cannot situate this text. It is unlike anything else I have read, though the vast majority of its constituent elements may be familiar. I can imagine you hating it, and I can imagine you loving it.
Some very helpful scene-setting and handy guides to what in the hell is going on (should you want them - tethered or untethered, that is the question) can be found here
http://contramundum.net/assets/hfa_7....
and here
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/h...
There is also the excellent Quarterly Conversation piece:
http://quarterlyconversation.com/read...
Some names mentioned in the text and in discussions/academia around the text to further help situate you:
Heidegger (there are certainly some satires of Mr H, but relatively affectionate ones I think - "Sich-vorweg-im-schon-sein-in" etc)
Husserl
Kant
Bergson (key, I think)
Joyce (though it bears almost no similarity to any of his work - the comparison to Ulysses is simply incorrect)
Proust
Musil
Paracelsus
Cortázar
Rabelais
Burton (it is most certainly an Anatomy of some sort)
Hegel (he does some Hegel jokes, at least I think they are jokes - my Hegel knowledge is too limited to know for sure)
This is one of the great novels about impossibility – the failure of words which stand between mind and world, the failure of philosophical thought to reach a totality, the failure of a novel to be complete, to be fully realised. It is also about what can still be achieved despite such limitation.
It is extraordinarily erudite, yet mocks its own learning. Genuine philosophical investigation sits side by side (sometimes in the same sentence) with its satire. It is funny, confusing, frustrating, exhilarating, beautiful and barking mad.
It is most certainly unique - I have never read anything that does what it does. However, as this is only part 1, I will leave a proper review and analysis until I have read part 2....And, as may be gleaned from the above, it has left me rather unsure of myself...
Here is a quote which sets out much of the "point" of this book:
If the title of this writing as a whole is Prae, does Prae say anything about what it wants? No, it does not. It does not even come anywhere close to itself. The same thing happens here as with the apprehensively penitent: as they pronounce the name of the sin, its place, the number of times, they immediately feel it is untruthful, so unaccustomed is the limited atmosphere of the “truth” after the infinitely extended nothingness of “life.” [...]
“Life is inexpressible”—for everyone that is an intolerable commonplace. But the massive concreteness of the “inexpressibility” can be expressed, and a form of expression of this kind, it so happens, would be the polar opposite of a commonplace, because never yet has it been done radically. Running behind the text of Prae, beside it and around it, is an organic accompanying stream, the “Non-Prae,” inseparable from Prae, which, unlike the temporary episodes of the above-mentioned oscillator, is a finite counterpart, complement, fellow balance-pan, or metaphorical arc of commentary to Prae. What exists, which is to say Prae itself, is a continual blunder, institutionalized prevarication [“truths”]; what is truly exciting, interesting, the one true faith or the actual, by its very nature lies outside any epic, and that is the inaccessible, the “Non-Prae,” which bears the same relation to Prae as a tautened bow string does to the arched shaft of the bow. On statues of Eros the figure of Eros is sometimes shown holding a marble bow; this has no bowstring, to be sure, but the bow is nevertheless arched in such a way that the viewer cannot fail to imagine the non-existent string as being there. In the figure of Prae there must, therefore, be some sort of positive signal from which the tensile strength of the “Non-Prae” that is constantly running in coexistence with Prae can be made perceptible, deducible. Principle: to utilize the essential impotence of literature with productive optimism as a useful structural factor: to make the constant ghostly absence and its continuo of otherness a harmonious component, to incorporate the “Non-Prae” into a work’s preserve in much the same way as in the Pantheon there also used to be an altar to the “unknown gods.”
"Non-Prae" is, in part, subjective experience, in case that is unclear (as that quote is taken from a much longer section which goes into things in more depth).
If you are interested, there are a lot more quotes in my updates.
Here is a little from an interview with the author in later years, which will again help with situating the text. I am not certain how much we can trust what he says, however:
Miklós Szentkuthy: Prae, my first novel, appeared in 1934. As to all the things that went into Prae, what inspired it, I already set that out with my accustomed terseness on the jacket blurb of the second edition, but what the hell, I’ll summarize it again — maybe expand on it a bit. I’ll recall a few of the subjects and books which, taken together, can be conceived as an imaginary Prae library of commentary on Prae.
During my university years, I read the German existentialist philosophers whom I… caricatured! let’s say. Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, and what have you. So I had a good chuckle at those who supposed (still suppose) that I am rooted in German philosophy of that kind. Quite the reverse: I was parodying real-life existentialist philosophers (and some I made up).
For instance, I invented the title of one of those philosophical works: Einleitung in die reine Undheit (‘An Introduction to Pure And-ness’). Dollykins is making herself known. Let’s hear what she has to say.
Dóra Szentkuthy: Someone from Paris paid us a visit and asked where the work Reine Undheit was to be found in the philosophical literature.
Miklós Szentkuthy: Oh, indeed! When the periodical Magyar Műhely produced a Szentkuthy issue, one of their staff paid me a visit. He said that he had searched in libraries for works that I had actually invented. Antal Szerb was aware of that, and in the review that he wrote for the journal Erdélyi Helikon after Prae appeared, he mentioned with a titter that Prae was full of quotations and titles taken from books of learning — strictly non-existent ones, of course.
(I took my readings in philosophy further, in the mid-Thirties, and I will speak about that later on when we get to it.)
When I wrote Prae I had already read Proust (I mentioned the circumstances: the Palatinus baths, sand, the exciting sight of women in swimming costumes…). He had demonstrable influence here and there. I am a hypersuperultraimpressionist, and instead of writing short stories, essays, small-scale and grand drama, aphorisms, fragments of memoirs, short novels, etc., out of my fantasies: I had always wanted to weave the fantastic thoughts and thousand impressions of my ‘Proust trauma’ of 1926 into the composition of a single giant work (the spur from the point of view of a ‘giant composition’ was Curtius’s Balzac monograph — I have already mentioned, in talking about my final years at grammar school — what an extraordinary influence it had on me).
À la recherche du temps perdu did not become my model through its analysis of psychological hypershading (though it is no slouch at that), but as a cathédrale des cathédrales: the literary counterpart of Reims and Amiens. I also read my way through almost all of Freud’s works, but their effect on Prae can be found at best only in traces.
I should note in passing that Proustian psychological portrayal and Freudian psychoanalysis have nothing at all in common! Many superficial people ignore that in putting Proust and Freud in the same pigeonhole.
In Proust there is no question of raising things from a ‘subconscious.’ Quite the contrary — that is, perhaps, a most characteristically French literary tradition anyway! — it is a matter of the clearest analysis of emotions and thought processes taking place at the top tier of the soul, in an almost ecstatically conscious knowledge of consciousness (worthy of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode). But whether Proust or Freud I was later bored rigid with all the psychologizing, and it was at this point that I was attracted to puppet-style representation, to puppet theater. Already in Prae, one of the protagonists edits a periodical named Antipsyche, which is not a negation of the psyche from a fun-fair materialist point of view but a counter to the great many exaggerated portrayals of the psyche in literature. To say nothing of what I frequently discussed with the psychiatrists and psychologists among my friends: the reason I became disenchanted with psychological portrayals is that my reading made it clear to me that, compared to the physiologically most complicated complex of the human body, the components of psychological life proceeded on a simpler scheme. People are disheartened in thinking how complicated the inner workings of psychological states and behaviors are; how complex, how paradoxical, how ambivalent. Really? One could count off the number of constituents on the fingers of both hands.
Our physical existence, our skin, our bones, our nerves, our bone marrow — now they are hypercomplex. To a non-medical person, those are all totally baffling: what are the physiological components that control even the tiniest movements we make? Call him Doctor Ignoramus Supremus, Creator Admiramus Ultimus, or God: he created our hypercomplicated organisms, the pituitary gland, hormones, biochemistry, respiration, the immune system — they evolved over millions of years to become what they are. That big apparatus, that hypercomplexity, in order that I should be able to take a book in my hand, eat a slice of bread, caress a woman, fall ill from time to time, and die? What’s this? What’s this about? That is why I’m in the habit of saying that my life and thought have two underlying motifs — ignorance and wonderment.
That is even more glaring in the case of animals. Even the simplest living beings are hypercomplicated, and we are continually discovering ever-newer physiological refinements within them. They eat, kill, preserve, race, perish. Is that the reason for this complicated organism? That untrackable physiology? Of course, the big difference is that the manifold constituents of our physical being are unknown to us, but our body — there’s no getting away from it — lives its own particular life regardless of us. On the other hand, we seem to be able to control matters of the psyche, ‘be sensible of them,’ and therefore they seem more complex.
That was merely a simile on my part to the effect that the ‘most complicated’ of the refined Freudian morsels of psychological life is paltry as compared to the constitution of our complicated body.
What of it? It was one of the reasons for my swinging away somewhat from psychology and for that protagonist in Prae starting the periodical Antipsyche. I took a strong liking to the representation of puppets.
Further inspiration for Prae:
At the time I wrote it, in 1928–1932, between the ages of 20 and 24, I was studying at a university. That is also the time to which my friendships with Gábor Halász and Antal Szerb date; in 1928 I made a big tour of Europe with my father, while in 1931 there was a one-year scholarship to study in England, my honeymoon, and more detailed perambulations in Europe. [.....]
So, the traveling in 1928 gave me the first impetus to write Prae. I set about as soon as I got back home, and the writing went largely in parallel to my dissertation on Ben Jonson.
The second big impetus was the European tour I made with Dolly in 1931–32.
My reading included Aldous Huxley, whose intellectualism both excited and attracted me (typically, the English were not too fond of him because he was — how should I put it? — a ‘continental’ style intellectual, alien to the British).
My reading also included: in French literature, Giraudoux, whose magical metaphors, similes, and games were likewise terribly appealing. Mauriac — his Catholicism, Jansenism, morality, and serious somberness had a big effect on me. Paul Valéry, whose, on the one hand, extraordinarily refined, hyperanalytical aphorisms and, on the other hand, poems imbued with the idea of ‘poésie pure’ were also fascinating. That was not, however, to point out that all of these were sucked up into Prae: they simply interested me.
I read Joyce in 1931; I’ve already related the circumstances in which I did, so here let me just note that the essence of the Joyce connection was his most minute observation of the most mundane reality and, at the same time, the most pyrotechnical mythological games — that duality is flesh and blood to my own psyche and nature: hypernaturalism and simultaneously a luxuriance of fantasy.
Joyce’s mental world was profoundly kindred to my own. Prae and Ulysses cannot be compared to Finnegans Wake. Our works are as distant from each other as Makó from Jerusalem, but in many respects their mental worlds are akin. It seems to be an exciting and amusing psychological law: the derivation of the simplest veristic observation and apocalyptic Bosch fantasy from one and the same root — Flaubert! Flaubert!
With regard to the style and stock of similes in Prae, the strongest influence was not Proust or even Joyce, but — my mathematical studies.
At that time I read countless books on modern physics and mathematics. Back then quantum theory was still a novelty, and I built up a whole little library of books on that. To mention just a few of them: Planck’s fundamental essay on quantum mechanics; the papers by Heisenberg and de Broglie on the uncertainty principle and wave mechanics, and Einstein’s short dissertation on the method of theoretical physics — for me those were great treasures in the early Thirties. It was around that time that I also read the marvelous books by Eddington on the physical world: The Nature of the Physical World and The Expanding Universe, and I read Jeans’ book on astronomy: The Mysterious Universe."
http://www.hlo.hu/news/frivolities_an...
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August 16, 202314 The Ultimate Failed Modernist Hyper-novel
Prae (1934, second edition 1980, English translation 2014) is one of the most important prewar novels, along with Finnegans Wake, The Man Without Qualities, and In Search of Lost Time. Volume 1 is available in English; it is 750 pages long, and the Hungarian original is 1,225 pages. (See "A Comedy of Ideas: Miklós Szentkuthy, Prae," 1981, posted on Hungarian Literature Online.) The entire book in English will be as long as Finnegans Wake or half of Proust.
The translation of Prae was not widely reviewed; I will take as my point of departure a review by Ágnes Orzóy, in The Quarterly Conversation (March 16, 2015). Orzóy suggests four principal meanings. I summarize them here, in order from less to more convincing:
1. Prae slows reading. "One needs to slow down, and then slow down even more, to read his sentences. In this sense, reading Szentkuthy in our speedy age is untimely but therapeutic: like a long walk in a forest or by the sea, it reminds us that we should live more slowly and attentively." This, however, doesn't seem like a description that's specific to Prae: it could apply as well to late Joyce, to some Beckett, to all of Celan, even to Nabokov.
2. Prae changes perception of the world. "There is another way in which reading Prae is a peculiar experience. After working her way through those endless pages about a thousand ways of perceiving a gesture, a wrinkle in a dress, a habit, or an idea, the reader finds herself resonating with landscapes and works of art in completely new ways.... reading Prae can be compared to training, say, for a martial art—while training, you sometimes feel that all you do is scream and sweat and kick and jump, but it eventually leads to an altered consciousness.... Prae is not only a preparation for writing but also... for living." This, I think, is critical nonsense: any strong work changes how we see.
3. "One way to characterise Prae," Orzóy writes, "is as the enactment of perception and artistic expression. Life is viewed as an endless series of masks and metamorphoses," but "as things metamorphose... they become even more themselves... plus something else that has an even more powerful... existence," and that surplus is "artistic expression—form—if not the principle of life itself."
4. "Prae... is also about inexpressibility" and things that are unrepresentable. "And it is precisely this unrepresentability that Prae tackles, while admitting that... behind the words—behind Szentkuthy’s hyperintelligent and hypersensitive prolixity—the cantus firmus... is 'No Word,' that is, inexpressibility."
These last two are right, I think, but what matters is how they work in any given passage; otherwise they are the sorts of straightforward philosophic claims that Prae itself continuously elaborates, undermines, and dissolves into its more complex ongoing meditations. Here I will suggest how a close reading might alter these last two conclusions.
The entire book is dense with breathless philosophizing. Most pages are taken up with analyses of phenomena, feelings, and ideas, and many pages contain theories, often structured as two-, three-, and four-part analyses. Szentkuthy had recently read Heidegger and psychoanalysis, and his text shows a wide, if diffuse, awareness of Kantian tradition, Platonism, Romanticism, medieval and classical philosophy, contemporaneous psychology, some recent physics (Schroedinger), and modernist fiction, including Proust and Joyce.
Szentkuthy's analyses are sometimes perceptive, and I suspect that is what leads readers like Orzóy to praise his insight. But many more are opaque, mainly because the range of metaphors and allusions is at once vague and too extravagant to make sense. Let me quote an example at some length to give a sense of this. It is the opening of a section titled "The three relations of substance and day-to-day reality: close kinship, barely touching, absolute otherness" (p. 194). The opening paragraphs set out those three relations, one after another, as in a philosophic essay:
"...the first step was the 'truth' grade, at which at which object and its essence were together like the Laocoon Group, where the extremities of the suffering and strangled man are the serpents that squeeze him to death: the state of identity poisoning.
"The second step, when the 'substance' is merely reflected on the object and sometimes brushes it: the object endeavors to work its essence out of itself, but in the end it gets no more than a coquettish tongue lashing from its essence: the essence does not infiltrate the pores of the object like bacilli, that would push it into a deadly 'substancitis,' but nibble a bit of it here and there, or keep dropping in strange little puzzle case-endings.
"Finally, the third step, a logical culmination of 'identity': in other words, the alterity grade: when the essence is still not airy enough, even in momentary silhouette shape it is still an excessive mimicry of the object, then it hatches out of the empty space of materiality like a foreign lining that appears on turning a glove inside out (the birth of Venus emerging from the sea is in point of fact a similar kind of lining-disclosure: the reverse of the blind sea brought to public attention), a second-degree nothing hatching from a first-degree nothing that humiliates the first as a crude 'something'; otherness, which is alone capable of meeting the requirements of 'spirituality' (geometry, not ethos), of absurd ethereality; the least common point between object and substance induces thickening, and thus an exacerbation, which cannot happen with the therapy of otherness..."
It is possible to read this, and all of Prae, as what would have to be called a kind of poetry: that is, you'd read for the images and the rhetoric more than the sense. But that is not what Szentkuthy expected. He's in earnest when he exposits his theories, and serious when he analyzes perception, imagination, and conceptualization. He wants readers to follow his thought. But if I do -- if I read this passage carefully, for example, trying to extract his claims -- I am stopped by the looseness of his metaphors. He chooses his metaphors quickly, and they don't always make sense even when his meaning can be deduced. In some cases, like "strange little puzzle case-endings," he has something in mind but doesn't bother to expand on it. In other cases, such as the "blind sea brought to public attention," he's just writing too quickly to make good sense. Presumably what he meant here was "unseen ocean made visible." In yet other cases, like the notion that essence "hatches out of the empty space of materiality like a foreign lining," he's just writing carelessly. Linings don't hatch, and they aren't foreign.
(A parenthesis on the visual: these same issues extend to Szentkuthy's use of visual images. It's often unpleasant to visualize them because they are so carelessly chosen and evoked. In the opening pages, for example, there is a sunflower, a "Venetian ship" in the moonlight, an ellipse, and some radiating lines. His images are schematic and ugly, even though he doesn't mean them to be: he tends to favor simple visual images, but he doesn't think visually, so the images are crude, cliched, and harsh in comparison to his kaleidoscopic conceptualizations.)
If Szentkuthy were a student of mine, and this was presented as nonfiction or philosophy, I'd mark up every sentence. In order to write philosophy he would have needed both a line-by-line editor and a censor. But this is fiction, so the question is how to understand 700 pages (with many more to come) of pseudo-logical pseudo-reasoning, when the author himself, and the narrator, both clearly ask readers to understand the text not only as poetry, but also as argument.
What drives the narrator in Prae is a desire to understand, but he is continuously frustrated not only by his own hyper-vigilant introspection and doubt, but also by his skittishness, his inability to settle down to consider one thing at a time. Prae is a novel of wheel-spinning, frantic, anxious, delirious (in Dali's sense of that word) conceptualizing. Its affect is vertiginous instability: the rug is pulled out from under the narrator's feet by his own restlessness. There is an urgency that drives him on, so he repeatedly forgets his own insights and pushes on, and past, other insights, like a man stumbling on a treadmill.
The theory of the modernist novel
An endorsement by a writer named Pal Nagy, printed in the inside pages of the book (and I'm guessing translated expressly for this edition), claims "virtually all of the problems of the old and the 20th century experimental novel can be found" in Prae. Certainly it's possible to read Prae as a hypertrophied, often monstrous, outgrowth of several tendencies of the modernist novel. If Walser, Gombrowicz, and Musil are intensely introspective, then Szentkuthy is crazily intensely introspective. If Musil, Proust, and others exemplify a moment in which the novel felt it had to be reconciled with the essay form, then Szentkuthy's book is the last gasping breaths of both the essay and the narrative. Plot is almost completely absent here: it's nearly strangled by the compulsive thinking. And if structural and linguistic complexity and extravagant length are necessities for the novel, as in Finnegans Wake or Arno Schmidt, then Szentkuthy is the author who works the hardest to come up with a new species of complexity and a new endlessness.
But the book is careless in its elaborations. For me, the most compelling part of the book is Chapter 1, which sets out the narrator's attempts to construct a novel. The entire book opens with an outline, in three parts (A, B, C), with several subdivisions, intended to support the production of a "supra-fictional stratum" that includes both an "'object'-novel" ("that is the ontological branch") and a "hyperaction'-novel" (that is the mania for fictiveness"): in other words, a contemporary novel that has both essayism and narrative. This is Musil's problematic, and Proust's, and in Prae it is introduced in the most extravagant imaginable fashion: the first 44 pages of the novel are an extended, systematic elaboration of the outline on the first page, as the narrator struggles, and of course fails, to establish a ground for his novel, which of course never quite takes place. The chapter is outrageously complicated -- it's hard to hold in mind while you read, which is why Szentkuthy provides the outline -- and it's improbable, because it all turns on the narrator's distaste for his girlfriend's reaction to a hat in a store window. In addition it's preposterously abstract, because it is an elaboration of the impossible conditions of the ineffectual conceptualization of a project, the modernist novel, which wouldn't even be enabled even if the meditations would possibly ever be finished or make sense or be useful.
This is not the same as the issue he works with Towards the One and Only Metaphor (1935), where "the ontological branch" becomes a matter of "biological" experiments, even thought it is still contrasted against a "pathology of consciousness," "self-analytical, and overscrupulous." The "pathology" is more focused, in "Towards the One and Only Metaphor," on language, because Szentkuthy is thinking more of Joyce's Work in Progress; and the "ontological" tends toward Szentkuthy's own biological and scientific or scientistic interests and his own theories of "Baroque" or "Hellenistic-rococo" writing. As László Németh pointed out, Prae's affinities lie more with Kantian critique than Proust or Musil. (This is in Rainer Hanshe's essay, "Entering the World Stage: Miklós Szentkuthy's Ars Poetica"; Hanshe is founder of Contra Mundum, which published the English translation of Prae.) But Szentkuthy's affinities with Kantian critique, with what he thought of as the Baroque, or with modernist science, are his own idiosyncratic choices, and Joyce's Work in Progress was of interest because it was unassimilable. The problematic of Szentkuthy's generation, and the reason Prae is still of interest, is more general, and it is well set out in the opening chapter: it's the impossible meeting of essayism (whatever its subject) and endlessly refined, knowingly "pathological" thoughtfulness.
I hope every novelist and historian of the modern and contemporary novel reads the opening 44 pages of Prae: they are the best example of the impassable swamps that lie in wait for any writer who still wrestles with the problems Proust, Musil, and Szentkuthy first experienced. Not much of this problematic has been solved: the novel remains "unwritten," "unwritable," a "novel in parenthesis," a "meta-novel," an "anti-novel": those are all Szentkuthy's formulations, written a hundred years ago.
Prae (1934, second edition 1980, English translation 2014) is one of the most important prewar novels, along with Finnegans Wake, The Man Without Qualities, and In Search of Lost Time. Volume 1 is available in English; it is 750 pages long, and the Hungarian original is 1,225 pages. (See "A Comedy of Ideas: Miklós Szentkuthy, Prae," 1981, posted on Hungarian Literature Online.) The entire book in English will be as long as Finnegans Wake or half of Proust.
The translation of Prae was not widely reviewed; I will take as my point of departure a review by Ágnes Orzóy, in The Quarterly Conversation (March 16, 2015). Orzóy suggests four principal meanings. I summarize them here, in order from less to more convincing:
1. Prae slows reading. "One needs to slow down, and then slow down even more, to read his sentences. In this sense, reading Szentkuthy in our speedy age is untimely but therapeutic: like a long walk in a forest or by the sea, it reminds us that we should live more slowly and attentively." This, however, doesn't seem like a description that's specific to Prae: it could apply as well to late Joyce, to some Beckett, to all of Celan, even to Nabokov.
2. Prae changes perception of the world. "There is another way in which reading Prae is a peculiar experience. After working her way through those endless pages about a thousand ways of perceiving a gesture, a wrinkle in a dress, a habit, or an idea, the reader finds herself resonating with landscapes and works of art in completely new ways.... reading Prae can be compared to training, say, for a martial art—while training, you sometimes feel that all you do is scream and sweat and kick and jump, but it eventually leads to an altered consciousness.... Prae is not only a preparation for writing but also... for living." This, I think, is critical nonsense: any strong work changes how we see.
3. "One way to characterise Prae," Orzóy writes, "is as the enactment of perception and artistic expression. Life is viewed as an endless series of masks and metamorphoses," but "as things metamorphose... they become even more themselves... plus something else that has an even more powerful... existence," and that surplus is "artistic expression—form—if not the principle of life itself."
4. "Prae... is also about inexpressibility" and things that are unrepresentable. "And it is precisely this unrepresentability that Prae tackles, while admitting that... behind the words—behind Szentkuthy’s hyperintelligent and hypersensitive prolixity—the cantus firmus... is 'No Word,' that is, inexpressibility."
These last two are right, I think, but what matters is how they work in any given passage; otherwise they are the sorts of straightforward philosophic claims that Prae itself continuously elaborates, undermines, and dissolves into its more complex ongoing meditations. Here I will suggest how a close reading might alter these last two conclusions.
The entire book is dense with breathless philosophizing. Most pages are taken up with analyses of phenomena, feelings, and ideas, and many pages contain theories, often structured as two-, three-, and four-part analyses. Szentkuthy had recently read Heidegger and psychoanalysis, and his text shows a wide, if diffuse, awareness of Kantian tradition, Platonism, Romanticism, medieval and classical philosophy, contemporaneous psychology, some recent physics (Schroedinger), and modernist fiction, including Proust and Joyce.
Szentkuthy's analyses are sometimes perceptive, and I suspect that is what leads readers like Orzóy to praise his insight. But many more are opaque, mainly because the range of metaphors and allusions is at once vague and too extravagant to make sense. Let me quote an example at some length to give a sense of this. It is the opening of a section titled "The three relations of substance and day-to-day reality: close kinship, barely touching, absolute otherness" (p. 194). The opening paragraphs set out those three relations, one after another, as in a philosophic essay:
"...the first step was the 'truth' grade, at which at which object and its essence were together like the Laocoon Group, where the extremities of the suffering and strangled man are the serpents that squeeze him to death: the state of identity poisoning.
"The second step, when the 'substance' is merely reflected on the object and sometimes brushes it: the object endeavors to work its essence out of itself, but in the end it gets no more than a coquettish tongue lashing from its essence: the essence does not infiltrate the pores of the object like bacilli, that would push it into a deadly 'substancitis,' but nibble a bit of it here and there, or keep dropping in strange little puzzle case-endings.
"Finally, the third step, a logical culmination of 'identity': in other words, the alterity grade: when the essence is still not airy enough, even in momentary silhouette shape it is still an excessive mimicry of the object, then it hatches out of the empty space of materiality like a foreign lining that appears on turning a glove inside out (the birth of Venus emerging from the sea is in point of fact a similar kind of lining-disclosure: the reverse of the blind sea brought to public attention), a second-degree nothing hatching from a first-degree nothing that humiliates the first as a crude 'something'; otherness, which is alone capable of meeting the requirements of 'spirituality' (geometry, not ethos), of absurd ethereality; the least common point between object and substance induces thickening, and thus an exacerbation, which cannot happen with the therapy of otherness..."
It is possible to read this, and all of Prae, as what would have to be called a kind of poetry: that is, you'd read for the images and the rhetoric more than the sense. But that is not what Szentkuthy expected. He's in earnest when he exposits his theories, and serious when he analyzes perception, imagination, and conceptualization. He wants readers to follow his thought. But if I do -- if I read this passage carefully, for example, trying to extract his claims -- I am stopped by the looseness of his metaphors. He chooses his metaphors quickly, and they don't always make sense even when his meaning can be deduced. In some cases, like "strange little puzzle case-endings," he has something in mind but doesn't bother to expand on it. In other cases, such as the "blind sea brought to public attention," he's just writing too quickly to make good sense. Presumably what he meant here was "unseen ocean made visible." In yet other cases, like the notion that essence "hatches out of the empty space of materiality like a foreign lining," he's just writing carelessly. Linings don't hatch, and they aren't foreign.
(A parenthesis on the visual: these same issues extend to Szentkuthy's use of visual images. It's often unpleasant to visualize them because they are so carelessly chosen and evoked. In the opening pages, for example, there is a sunflower, a "Venetian ship" in the moonlight, an ellipse, and some radiating lines. His images are schematic and ugly, even though he doesn't mean them to be: he tends to favor simple visual images, but he doesn't think visually, so the images are crude, cliched, and harsh in comparison to his kaleidoscopic conceptualizations.)
If Szentkuthy were a student of mine, and this was presented as nonfiction or philosophy, I'd mark up every sentence. In order to write philosophy he would have needed both a line-by-line editor and a censor. But this is fiction, so the question is how to understand 700 pages (with many more to come) of pseudo-logical pseudo-reasoning, when the author himself, and the narrator, both clearly ask readers to understand the text not only as poetry, but also as argument.
What drives the narrator in Prae is a desire to understand, but he is continuously frustrated not only by his own hyper-vigilant introspection and doubt, but also by his skittishness, his inability to settle down to consider one thing at a time. Prae is a novel of wheel-spinning, frantic, anxious, delirious (in Dali's sense of that word) conceptualizing. Its affect is vertiginous instability: the rug is pulled out from under the narrator's feet by his own restlessness. There is an urgency that drives him on, so he repeatedly forgets his own insights and pushes on, and past, other insights, like a man stumbling on a treadmill.
The theory of the modernist novel
An endorsement by a writer named Pal Nagy, printed in the inside pages of the book (and I'm guessing translated expressly for this edition), claims "virtually all of the problems of the old and the 20th century experimental novel can be found" in Prae. Certainly it's possible to read Prae as a hypertrophied, often monstrous, outgrowth of several tendencies of the modernist novel. If Walser, Gombrowicz, and Musil are intensely introspective, then Szentkuthy is crazily intensely introspective. If Musil, Proust, and others exemplify a moment in which the novel felt it had to be reconciled with the essay form, then Szentkuthy's book is the last gasping breaths of both the essay and the narrative. Plot is almost completely absent here: it's nearly strangled by the compulsive thinking. And if structural and linguistic complexity and extravagant length are necessities for the novel, as in Finnegans Wake or Arno Schmidt, then Szentkuthy is the author who works the hardest to come up with a new species of complexity and a new endlessness.
But the book is careless in its elaborations. For me, the most compelling part of the book is Chapter 1, which sets out the narrator's attempts to construct a novel. The entire book opens with an outline, in three parts (A, B, C), with several subdivisions, intended to support the production of a "supra-fictional stratum" that includes both an "'object'-novel" ("that is the ontological branch") and a "hyperaction'-novel" (that is the mania for fictiveness"): in other words, a contemporary novel that has both essayism and narrative. This is Musil's problematic, and Proust's, and in Prae it is introduced in the most extravagant imaginable fashion: the first 44 pages of the novel are an extended, systematic elaboration of the outline on the first page, as the narrator struggles, and of course fails, to establish a ground for his novel, which of course never quite takes place. The chapter is outrageously complicated -- it's hard to hold in mind while you read, which is why Szentkuthy provides the outline -- and it's improbable, because it all turns on the narrator's distaste for his girlfriend's reaction to a hat in a store window. In addition it's preposterously abstract, because it is an elaboration of the impossible conditions of the ineffectual conceptualization of a project, the modernist novel, which wouldn't even be enabled even if the meditations would possibly ever be finished or make sense or be useful.
This is not the same as the issue he works with Towards the One and Only Metaphor (1935), where "the ontological branch" becomes a matter of "biological" experiments, even thought it is still contrasted against a "pathology of consciousness," "self-analytical, and overscrupulous." The "pathology" is more focused, in "Towards the One and Only Metaphor," on language, because Szentkuthy is thinking more of Joyce's Work in Progress; and the "ontological" tends toward Szentkuthy's own biological and scientific or scientistic interests and his own theories of "Baroque" or "Hellenistic-rococo" writing. As László Németh pointed out, Prae's affinities lie more with Kantian critique than Proust or Musil. (This is in Rainer Hanshe's essay, "Entering the World Stage: Miklós Szentkuthy's Ars Poetica"; Hanshe is founder of Contra Mundum, which published the English translation of Prae.) But Szentkuthy's affinities with Kantian critique, with what he thought of as the Baroque, or with modernist science, are his own idiosyncratic choices, and Joyce's Work in Progress was of interest because it was unassimilable. The problematic of Szentkuthy's generation, and the reason Prae is still of interest, is more general, and it is well set out in the opening chapter: it's the impossible meeting of essayism (whatever its subject) and endlessly refined, knowingly "pathological" thoughtfulness.
I hope every novelist and historian of the modern and contemporary novel reads the opening 44 pages of Prae: they are the best example of the impassable swamps that lie in wait for any writer who still wrestles with the problems Proust, Musil, and Szentkuthy first experienced. Not much of this problematic has been solved: the novel remains "unwritten," "unwritable," a "novel in parenthesis," a "meta-novel," an "anti-novel": those are all Szentkuthy's formulations, written a hundred years ago.
March 24, 2019
I'm going to try and be brief, and I'm mostly going to fail, but even then I'm only going to scratch the surface of this immense (forget size, I'm talking about scope, about breadth, about the immensity of the intellect on display; if you want to feel inadequate read this and always keep in the forefront of your mind that Szentkuthy was 26 when he wrote it).
This book is primarily concerned with two things: 1) Life is inexpressible; and 2) How does one then express life?
As this book likes to dive in on itself, popping between levels (both in terms of frame narrative and in terms of metaphor) it is only appropriate that it almost immediately drops into the text of an essay written by one of the principle characters. In it, he explores three attempts at describing an event: the reality (I'll use the term loosely; he describes it as it "comes from life"), the theme, and the story (novel; image; some analogue). The three expressions are fairly disconnected, and the “reality” – the sunflower image – is almost impossible to visualize – while the novelization is crisp, but, again, disconnected from reality:
I was probably halfway through the book before the whole "Hungarian Ulysses" descriptor began making sense to me. Much like Joyce, Szentkuthy is decidedly, vehemently, moving away from realism, into something more akin to life/reality as he sees it. Joyce - I'm dumbing this way down because I'm not trying to right 1000's of words on my phone - in part did this by narrating a single day (which took 700 pages) by moving from exterior (realism) to the interior (explicitly through extended stream of consciousness; also throughout the novel he would focus on the interiority of his characters, while also explicating the archetypical backing structure of the story as presented). Szentkuthy is interested in this as well, but he greatly expands this beyond an attempt to capture the reality of consciousness and identity/representation, and instead is attempting to capture reality itself, which, again, he himself considers inexpressible. As such, this is more his Finnegans Wake than his Ulysses. Just as Joyce recognized the necessity of a new, obscured, language to narrate the murky dream driven night, Szentkuthy recognizes the need for a new form of narrative to capture the true representation of life. Unlike Joyce, who recognized and pursued (and ultimately captured and expressed) his night language, Szentkuthy recognizes (in his mind) the inexpressibility of life, and instead sets out to express the inexpressibility, as opposed to expressing the inexpressible. It's basically the difference between describing an impossible act and performing an impossible act; which sounds like a cop out, but in truth, in this instance, even the description of the act is itself an impossible act, requiring a complete disavowal of the traditional novel structure, and instead coming up with something that is more fractured, but blends philosophy, literary theory, geometry, modernism, fashion, architecture, design, and utterly precise narrative to create a representation of a whole that is completely unique.
I said it when reviewing McElroy's "Women and Men", but it applies here as well: no one else writes like this. But in fact, Szentkuthy shares one important trait with McElroy: his language is difficult not due to obscuration, but in fact it is difficult precisely due to its exacting precision. In attempting to capture life in all its complexity and unreasonable movement, Szentkuthy's precision in narration becomes overwhelming and monstrous. And by that I mean it's amazing. There is no way to read this and not come away with the certainty of Szentkuthy's literary talents - even if his sections of precision are too much, he counterbalances them with description of such beauty and poetry that it's apparent that he is a writer completely in control of his craft, and if we as readers fail in our understanding, it is because we as readers fail.
There is nothing to compare this book to, it is singular. (excepting hopefully soon forthcoming Vol 2) For those who are always diving, always exploring for something new, something not seen before, this is for you. Maybe. Hell, you might hate it. That's the thing with singularity, there are no reference points, there is nothing to prepare the way for you, it is a novel that teaches you to read it as you read it, and in this (and in so many other un-enumerated ways) it succeeds spectacularly.
Some quick end notes:
The last 100 or so pages are amazing, where most books like this have worn out their approach, Szentkuthy seems to only be picking up steam. It is frantic, wild, and - within the confines of the narrative - tightly reined in terms of mastery of execution.
Is there a release date on Vol 2 yet? I need that shit now.
Writing a review about a book that's attempting to approach the inexpressible is damn hard.
This book is primarily concerned with two things: 1) Life is inexpressible; and 2) How does one then express life?
As this book likes to dive in on itself, popping between levels (both in terms of frame narrative and in terms of metaphor) it is only appropriate that it almost immediately drops into the text of an essay written by one of the principle characters. In it, he explores three attempts at describing an event: the reality (I'll use the term loosely; he describes it as it "comes from life"), the theme, and the story (novel; image; some analogue). The three expressions are fairly disconnected, and the “reality” – the sunflower image – is almost impossible to visualize – while the novelization is crisp, but, again, disconnected from reality:
In contrast (and as a result) the sunflower, despite its being a fragmentary grimace of deficiency, inhaled the whole space into itself like a small fish which puffs itself up to death by swallowing its entire water orchard; the theme, which from the viewpoint of material, was poorer and more limited than even the scrap of sunflower, left more space around itself, the way a part of sugar is left undissolved in tea, and in the end the ship under construction was like a door that has been smashed into smithereens by the continuation of absolute openness and the curtailment of the spatial nude figure (perpetuum nudile). Which, then, was the picture that represented the concluding, third stage in the initial scheme Of my novel, leveled against the stingy, 'discretely clothed' girl as it was?It is against the backdrop of this deficiency that Prae begins; it is the overall theme and primary concern of the work. The book is both an attempt at a new form of narrative – and, as the form of narrative required is impossible, it also a “planning” (hence: Prae) of the narrative; it steps in and out of itself, examines it’s methods, provides backing philosophy (much of the German philosophy referenced is admittedly far outside my sphere of knowledge, which was a hindrance, but not a stoppage), develops sketches of charaters and scenes with special attention to the geometry of spaces and scenes, and brings a devastating precision to the events and affairs it examines. Narratives are dropped through a wormhole of descriptions and asides only to be picked up 200 pages later (helpfully identified through sub-chapter heading).
In the new narrative there is no kind of succession; If a narrative should by chance appear in book form, that is only because of constraint and powerlessness; in truth, any detail might occur anywhere; the whole Work might be rearranged at any time. A novel's scope is not identical to the sum range of its narrative elements, but is much greater, just as the basin of an aquarium is greater than the mass of the fishes in it. The unity of a structure does not manifest in the geometrical assemblage of its component elements, but in part in the extreme & non-plus volatility of the totality of component elements, in part in the infinite extent of the wave-space suggested by them.Much of this novel appears to be a direct attack/refutation of Realism as a literary movement. Again, if reality is in its essence inexpressible, how would Realism adequately express it? Well, it doesn’t, in fact, in its attempt at expression it removes those things that make up reality; and in its fevered attempt at order, structure, and “story”, it removes that which makes reality real.
That is when it becomes truly apparent how unreal every 'plot', every life story that is told about one, is in contrast to one's genuine life, which is the movement that avoids progress in time and exchanges in space: so extremely only-spool, never a thread. If I recollect a visit made socially, I see the tangledness of a dripstone cave, where the hours and places, the bus, the residence, the faces of the guests, the afternoons feeble clarity and the epidemic Hood of the closing-in of evening trickle onto and against each other like stalagmites and stalactites, drips & towers that were not constructed, to a plan, but by passive dripping (an endless tape of intonation on which a tangled afternoon is a minute wrinkle, et cetera); consciousness always uses bad, shifted emphases. On the other hand, if I relate the story of my visit after it, then (with no little exertion) I cut regular columns and charming plot walls out of thin stone configurations and mud idols with elephantiasis: onto the stems of the capricious cave flowers I stick whatever ‘time' is appropriate there (before doing so I make a careful examination of the little bud to check whether time is really needed there), & then I select the 'spaces' from the lump of pressed fruits (likewise with a conscientious magnifying glass), & I collect the two groups in separate racks, and alternately stow them away with checkerboard justice next to each other. The whole regular ornamentation has little to do with my life, but that is how I operate, because my female friend also operates that way, I am only acquainted with her life that way, sorted into a plot, from time immemorial, and I ape the game, trying to set out my life into a story.He goes on - through elaborate metaphor - to further this thought, that realism mistakes the surface for the depths, where Szentkuthy argues that they in no way have anything in common with each other. This only goes back to his early thesis that life is inexpressible; and yet, he continues to attempt to express this inexpressibility.
I was probably halfway through the book before the whole "Hungarian Ulysses" descriptor began making sense to me. Much like Joyce, Szentkuthy is decidedly, vehemently, moving away from realism, into something more akin to life/reality as he sees it. Joyce - I'm dumbing this way down because I'm not trying to right 1000's of words on my phone - in part did this by narrating a single day (which took 700 pages) by moving from exterior (realism) to the interior (explicitly through extended stream of consciousness; also throughout the novel he would focus on the interiority of his characters, while also explicating the archetypical backing structure of the story as presented). Szentkuthy is interested in this as well, but he greatly expands this beyond an attempt to capture the reality of consciousness and identity/representation, and instead is attempting to capture reality itself, which, again, he himself considers inexpressible. As such, this is more his Finnegans Wake than his Ulysses. Just as Joyce recognized the necessity of a new, obscured, language to narrate the murky dream driven night, Szentkuthy recognizes the need for a new form of narrative to capture the true representation of life. Unlike Joyce, who recognized and pursued (and ultimately captured and expressed) his night language, Szentkuthy recognizes (in his mind) the inexpressibility of life, and instead sets out to express the inexpressibility, as opposed to expressing the inexpressible. It's basically the difference between describing an impossible act and performing an impossible act; which sounds like a cop out, but in truth, in this instance, even the description of the act is itself an impossible act, requiring a complete disavowal of the traditional novel structure, and instead coming up with something that is more fractured, but blends philosophy, literary theory, geometry, modernism, fashion, architecture, design, and utterly precise narrative to create a representation of a whole that is completely unique.
I said it when reviewing McElroy's "Women and Men", but it applies here as well: no one else writes like this. But in fact, Szentkuthy shares one important trait with McElroy: his language is difficult not due to obscuration, but in fact it is difficult precisely due to its exacting precision. In attempting to capture life in all its complexity and unreasonable movement, Szentkuthy's precision in narration becomes overwhelming and monstrous. And by that I mean it's amazing. There is no way to read this and not come away with the certainty of Szentkuthy's literary talents - even if his sections of precision are too much, he counterbalances them with description of such beauty and poetry that it's apparent that he is a writer completely in control of his craft, and if we as readers fail in our understanding, it is because we as readers fail.
There is nothing to compare this book to, it is singular. (excepting hopefully soon forthcoming Vol 2) For those who are always diving, always exploring for something new, something not seen before, this is for you. Maybe. Hell, you might hate it. That's the thing with singularity, there are no reference points, there is nothing to prepare the way for you, it is a novel that teaches you to read it as you read it, and in this (and in so many other un-enumerated ways) it succeeds spectacularly.
Some quick end notes:
The last 100 or so pages are amazing, where most books like this have worn out their approach, Szentkuthy seems to only be picking up steam. It is frantic, wild, and - within the confines of the narrative - tightly reined in terms of mastery of execution.
Is there a release date on Vol 2 yet? I need that shit now.
Writing a review about a book that's attempting to approach the inexpressible is damn hard.
Read
September 15, 2018Joyce. Proust. Musil. Szentkuthy.
Go forth ye chosen and Prae.
_________
"Reading Prae"
by Ágnes Orzóy (2015)
http://quarterlyconversation.com/read...
"I would say that he is Joycean in his masterful juggling of European culture in describing everyday life, Rabelaisian in his grotesque extravagance, Sterneian in his predilection for digression as a structural device, and Proustian in his keen and precise recording of sense impressions and their sediments in our mind." [there is nothing misleading about that quartet of affinities. If only because every single one of those four Proper=Name adj's themselves are fully multi=valiant. They, all four, are themselves each pluralities. Multiplicity is what each of their names mean. To be 'like' any of these four is to be totally unlike anything else ever.]
"To think of plot (and character development) in regard to a text like Prae is somewhat senseless, since plot and character have no priority in the book, being just two constituents among many, but whatever plot the book has is certainly meager—a summary of Prae is comparable in length to a summary of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake" [That's almost already too many words spent addressing this tired question of "plot". Who cares?]
"The novel, if one can call it that..." [heh. You know it's a novel because you feel it necessary to qualify it with "but maybe it's not".
"The book betokens an author who seems to have had more than the usual five senses, and an extremely acute consciousness which registered a thousand sparks of perception within a mere second, so the reader feels she has all her life been walking around deaf and blind." [very true that]
"The overabundant metaphors and descriptions are at times revelatory, a glimpse of a true genius, though sometimes they can be absolutely maddening." [I think some it is a load of shit too ; depending on which character's mouth/mind they're located in ; which, of course....]
"A typical Szentkuthy metaphor is like a Baroque concetto, or conceit: the juxtaposition of far-fetched things that, seen together, cause great delight, or even a sense of sudden enlightenment." [some of these things brought together in metaphor are almost inconceivably far apart and indeed in their jux the do very much delight.]
"However, it is neither well-rounded character nor a finely constructed plot that Szentkuthy is after in Prae, and neither is the book a novel of ideas." [those first two, obviously enough. It's that second one though that is still tempting ; it's so packed with thinking. It reminds me of Musil but his Ideenroman I found rather flat in the thinking department ;; Prae much more agile in that dept.]
"One way to characterise Prae is as the enactment of perception and artistic expression." [but kind of all art does that. It is a thing, not (just) about a thing. Art as enactment.]
"Prae, however, is also about inexpressibility" [This is the territory where 'difficulty' and 'unreadable' often get thrown around.]
"And behind the words—behind Szentkuthy’s hyperintelligent and hypersensitive prolixity—the cantus firmus (the pre-existent melody) is “No Word,” that is, inexpressibility." [nicely put]
"However, as Péter Esterházy said about Szentkuthy in an interview, “there is no point in cutting a Szentkuthy text: the same amount remains. If there was too much to begin with, there will remain too much.”" [That should sound very familiar to many of you and your BIG Brick Books, eh?]
"who would have thought that an episode as banal as a woman calling a doctor could contain so much psychology, anatomy, sociology, as well as literary and religious allusions"
"like a long walk in a forest or by the sea, it reminds us that we should live more slowly and attentively." [a 'long walk' is far too short for a comparison here. Hiking the Appalachian maybe.]
_________
"Paul Griffiths on a Forgotten Modernist Masterpiece"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-gri...
"0 Comments"
"What if, in other words, Miklós Szentkuthy?" [Indeed. And thus it was so.]
"Given that Szentkuthy—besides writing many pages daily, seated in his library of 25,000 volumes"
"...our slowness in reciprocating is unjust." [so it's not just me]
"Szentkuthy’s muse was Baroque"
"If nothing else, Szentkuthy must be one of the first writers of fiction to allude with ease to Heidegger and Heisenberg." [Sz in 1934, SuZ 1927 ; pretty quick for an Hungarian!]
"...good reason why Szentkuthy, with his polymathic prose, should have had to wait..."
"Through a genetic process, therefore, the text becomes plump. The plot, one might say if there were a plot, thickens." [That's genius. "Becomes plump" not "thickens". The plot enplumbs!]
"A spot test for the translator will normally be the comprehensibility of any passage in the target language, but in Szentkuthy that may not be at all a suitable criterion."
"Whether readers will be happy to entertain themselves with “a continual blunder” is a matter largely of patience. Szentkuthy is hard going. Often one will give up, after straining one’s head over a knotty paragraph or the sense of something missing, and not the least value of Sikorski’s dissertation is its assurance that one is not alone, that “to read and to fully understand the whole text of Prae . . . is an enterprise that might take many years of hard work”." [some humility on the part of the reader is always advisable ; you are not going to conquer (ie, 'understand') or master this text on a first pass through.]
____________
And you can read this nice piece too which has to do with the question of Weltliteratur ::
"Entering the World Stage: Miklós Szentkuthy's Ars Poetica"
by Rainer J. Hanshe
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/spec...
Go forth ye chosen and Prae.
_________
"Reading Prae"
by Ágnes Orzóy (2015)
http://quarterlyconversation.com/read...
"I would say that he is Joycean in his masterful juggling of European culture in describing everyday life, Rabelaisian in his grotesque extravagance, Sterneian in his predilection for digression as a structural device, and Proustian in his keen and precise recording of sense impressions and their sediments in our mind." [there is nothing misleading about that quartet of affinities. If only because every single one of those four Proper=Name adj's themselves are fully multi=valiant. They, all four, are themselves each pluralities. Multiplicity is what each of their names mean. To be 'like' any of these four is to be totally unlike anything else ever.]
"To think of plot (and character development) in regard to a text like Prae is somewhat senseless, since plot and character have no priority in the book, being just two constituents among many, but whatever plot the book has is certainly meager—a summary of Prae is comparable in length to a summary of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake" [That's almost already too many words spent addressing this tired question of "plot". Who cares?]
"The novel, if one can call it that..." [heh. You know it's a novel because you feel it necessary to qualify it with "but maybe it's not".
"The book betokens an author who seems to have had more than the usual five senses, and an extremely acute consciousness which registered a thousand sparks of perception within a mere second, so the reader feels she has all her life been walking around deaf and blind." [very true that]
"The overabundant metaphors and descriptions are at times revelatory, a glimpse of a true genius, though sometimes they can be absolutely maddening." [I think some it is a load of shit too ; depending on which character's mouth/mind they're located in ; which, of course....]
"A typical Szentkuthy metaphor is like a Baroque concetto, or conceit: the juxtaposition of far-fetched things that, seen together, cause great delight, or even a sense of sudden enlightenment." [some of these things brought together in metaphor are almost inconceivably far apart and indeed in their jux the do very much delight.]
"However, it is neither well-rounded character nor a finely constructed plot that Szentkuthy is after in Prae, and neither is the book a novel of ideas." [those first two, obviously enough. It's that second one though that is still tempting ; it's so packed with thinking. It reminds me of Musil but his Ideenroman I found rather flat in the thinking department ;; Prae much more agile in that dept.]
"One way to characterise Prae is as the enactment of perception and artistic expression." [but kind of all art does that. It is a thing, not (just) about a thing. Art as enactment.]
"Prae, however, is also about inexpressibility" [This is the territory where 'difficulty' and 'unreadable' often get thrown around.]
"And behind the words—behind Szentkuthy’s hyperintelligent and hypersensitive prolixity—the cantus firmus (the pre-existent melody) is “No Word,” that is, inexpressibility." [nicely put]
"However, as Péter Esterházy said about Szentkuthy in an interview, “there is no point in cutting a Szentkuthy text: the same amount remains. If there was too much to begin with, there will remain too much.”" [That should sound very familiar to many of you and your BIG Brick Books, eh?]
"who would have thought that an episode as banal as a woman calling a doctor could contain so much psychology, anatomy, sociology, as well as literary and religious allusions"
"like a long walk in a forest or by the sea, it reminds us that we should live more slowly and attentively." [a 'long walk' is far too short for a comparison here. Hiking the Appalachian maybe.]
_________
"Paul Griffiths on a Forgotten Modernist Masterpiece"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-gri...
"0 Comments"
"What if, in other words, Miklós Szentkuthy?" [Indeed. And thus it was so.]
"Given that Szentkuthy—besides writing many pages daily, seated in his library of 25,000 volumes"
"...our slowness in reciprocating is unjust." [so it's not just me]
"Szentkuthy’s muse was Baroque"
"If nothing else, Szentkuthy must be one of the first writers of fiction to allude with ease to Heidegger and Heisenberg." [Sz in 1934, SuZ 1927 ; pretty quick for an Hungarian!]
"...good reason why Szentkuthy, with his polymathic prose, should have had to wait..."
"Through a genetic process, therefore, the text becomes plump. The plot, one might say if there were a plot, thickens." [That's genius. "Becomes plump" not "thickens". The plot enplumbs!]
"A spot test for the translator will normally be the comprehensibility of any passage in the target language, but in Szentkuthy that may not be at all a suitable criterion."
"Whether readers will be happy to entertain themselves with “a continual blunder” is a matter largely of patience. Szentkuthy is hard going. Often one will give up, after straining one’s head over a knotty paragraph or the sense of something missing, and not the least value of Sikorski’s dissertation is its assurance that one is not alone, that “to read and to fully understand the whole text of Prae . . . is an enterprise that might take many years of hard work”." [some humility on the part of the reader is always advisable ; you are not going to conquer (ie, 'understand') or master this text on a first pass through.]
____________
And you can read this nice piece too which has to do with the question of Weltliteratur ::
"Entering the World Stage: Miklós Szentkuthy's Ars Poetica"
by Rainer J. Hanshe
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/spec...
July 9, 2021
A tragicomedy of ideas, an intellectual whirlwind, "Prae" is altogether a remarkable anomaly within the 20th century canon. Like "The Man Without Qualities" or "The Arcades Project", "Prae" assumes a kaleidoscopic panorama of European culture at the turn of modernity, the historical moment when all that is solid melted into air.
As with those magisterial works, "Prae" explodes the panoply of contemporary developments into axonometric view: the turns of fashion, abstract art, psychoanalysis, quantum physics, mathematics, and phenomenology are interwoven in Baroque style. (A survey of the chapter descriptions in the table of contents should give prospective readers a taste of the erudition on display: e.g. "Cannes at dawn: The philosophical chemistry of time & quiet on the houses", "dehumanizing lifestyle & modern ladies’ tailoring", "rationalism & the alluvial age. Heideggerian-love & Carnapian- love") [1].
The essayic digressions on such scattered topics serve as adumbrations for the novel's guiding problematic, roughly: what is the mode of representation befitting this new age? Szentkuthy charges at the question obliquely, mounting charades of indirection: various meta-commentaries, fabricated pseudo-academic references, and self-proclaimed "non-Prae diagonals" sever any remaining ties to realism, offering in its place an admixture of expressionism and rationalism. The leitmotif of "Prae" is this recurring dance of contrasts -- each pole charts a constellation around a subcurrent of modernity (vitalism / Naturphilosophie / Romanticism / bio-organicism one the one hand, materialism / logic / positivism / Sachlichkeit on the other), offering neither closure nor totality, only "ontological wordplay".
Szentkuthy is a master of lyrical abstraction approaching Proust. The most memorable passages of the novel, like those of "In Search of Lost Time", conjoin diffuse perceptions, emotions, and cogitations into some manifold distilling the essence of a conceptual flux ("the relation of the history of ideas, orthodox philology, & a showgirl"...). Genetic analysis of Szentkuthy's manuscripts reveals that he proceeded by vigilant reworking of his material, injecting non-sequitur cut-ups and anachronistic flights of fancy as the work progressed -- if he happened upon an inspiration of Bergson one week, he would find a place in the text within which to insert Bergsonisms. By this loose arrangement, "Prae" does occasionally stumble under its own weight, at times veering into long eddies of arbitrary surrealism or opaque scholasticism. The final chapter of the volume in particular came as something of a disappointing regression into absurdist folly, lacking any real continuity with the developed thematics.
For all its bizarre ornateness, "Prae" arrives at an aesthetic surpassing any ostensible historicism, preempting the likes of the nouveau-roman, the postmodern maximalist novel, or the post-generic hybrid-novel. Perhaps to a greater degree than the celebrated works of the modernist period, "Prae" announces the shape of literature in the 20th century.
[1] http://contramundum.net/assets/cmp_pr...
As with those magisterial works, "Prae" explodes the panoply of contemporary developments into axonometric view: the turns of fashion, abstract art, psychoanalysis, quantum physics, mathematics, and phenomenology are interwoven in Baroque style. (A survey of the chapter descriptions in the table of contents should give prospective readers a taste of the erudition on display: e.g. "Cannes at dawn: The philosophical chemistry of time & quiet on the houses", "dehumanizing lifestyle & modern ladies’ tailoring", "rationalism & the alluvial age. Heideggerian-love & Carnapian- love") [1].
The essayic digressions on such scattered topics serve as adumbrations for the novel's guiding problematic, roughly: what is the mode of representation befitting this new age? Szentkuthy charges at the question obliquely, mounting charades of indirection: various meta-commentaries, fabricated pseudo-academic references, and self-proclaimed "non-Prae diagonals" sever any remaining ties to realism, offering in its place an admixture of expressionism and rationalism. The leitmotif of "Prae" is this recurring dance of contrasts -- each pole charts a constellation around a subcurrent of modernity (vitalism / Naturphilosophie / Romanticism / bio-organicism one the one hand, materialism / logic / positivism / Sachlichkeit on the other), offering neither closure nor totality, only "ontological wordplay".
Szentkuthy is a master of lyrical abstraction approaching Proust. The most memorable passages of the novel, like those of "In Search of Lost Time", conjoin diffuse perceptions, emotions, and cogitations into some manifold distilling the essence of a conceptual flux ("the relation of the history of ideas, orthodox philology, & a showgirl"...). Genetic analysis of Szentkuthy's manuscripts reveals that he proceeded by vigilant reworking of his material, injecting non-sequitur cut-ups and anachronistic flights of fancy as the work progressed -- if he happened upon an inspiration of Bergson one week, he would find a place in the text within which to insert Bergsonisms. By this loose arrangement, "Prae" does occasionally stumble under its own weight, at times veering into long eddies of arbitrary surrealism or opaque scholasticism. The final chapter of the volume in particular came as something of a disappointing regression into absurdist folly, lacking any real continuity with the developed thematics.
For all its bizarre ornateness, "Prae" arrives at an aesthetic surpassing any ostensible historicism, preempting the likes of the nouveau-roman, the postmodern maximalist novel, or the post-generic hybrid-novel. Perhaps to a greater degree than the celebrated works of the modernist period, "Prae" announces the shape of literature in the 20th century.
[1] http://contramundum.net/assets/cmp_pr...
November 7, 2018
I read the book. The Peter Principle is in effect here, the overreach an impediment but not a stopper to reading the book. It became a game of suspended animation avatar into a multivariance preciosities of razzle-dazzle mind-bending labyrinth that goes on for 700-plus pages while summing nothing. I can't imagine reading the book again under almost any circumstance but, I might try something of his later work, see what/if the work becomes something tangible to a less than fully out-there reader. It because of this can neither claim brilliance nor nullity so five star for propensity to excellence, a noble reach by any measure, book.
January 10, 2022
here's a big ol tome from a neglected hungarian modernist only recently translated into english, and it's not quite like anything i've read before. it's probably closer to the tradition of the anatomy/menippean satire than the novel as such, but i don't know if there are many precursors for it there either. there are characters in the book but they're mostly used to play around with and manipulate the ideas he's interested in, and long sections are more essaylike in style than you would expect from a novel. there are some genuinely bizarre and singular metaphors and imagery that i can't really place as resembling any other author specifically, and in general there's an impression of such an intellect behind everything that it's almost incredible he wrote this at the age of around 25. as best i can tell, the book seems to be about the difficulty of representing reality in art, and the corresponding weaknesses of realism as a style. but there is also a lot of stuff about women and relationships, and long and short digressions into topics as diverse as quantum physics, then-contemporary architecture, the lives of the saints, mathematics, fashion design, and probably others that i missed. there's also repeated references to german philosophy, especially heidegger, and a lot of these references seem to be jokes because many of the texts and authors he cites are fictitious and just sound like heidegger titles. frankly there was a lot in the book i didn't understand but i didn't really mind because the prose style is so astonishing and singular and the book as a whole is like nothing else i've ever read. hopefully volume 2 is out in english soon.
some quotes:
"An embrace is always impossible because it seeks to simultaneously accomplish two gestures which are mutually exclusive: one is preparing the girl's exact mummy case, the other is a demented flinging-around of one's own body; the first feels a need to evenly cover the girl's shoulders and waist like the ritual black moss of Byzantium - the second wishes to tear one's own body into a thousand pieces with the profligate rapture of joy. As one's arms run around the girl's waist like crooked, decayed Iron-Age scissors in the display cases of museums, one's legs and back wish to scatter in the world, to dance at once in a thousand widely separated places. That was not impossible in the rain: one moment the body was clinging together like a snowball in preparation, clutched between the cupped palms of the hands - the next it was exploding like the lines of hanging green ducks in game dealer's shops that looters pillage around in streets forking out of the northern, southern & eastern outskirts."
"To use the language of a pedantic witchdoctor: the old narrative, which utilised the technique of memory, got stuck in the tedium of anemic time-monism; another experimental narrative strives to accomplish the absurdity of placing the various events, totally free of time, as pure spatial elements with the most capricious architectural tricks possible."
"What is exciting about mornings, however, is that nothing at all new starts in them, but the past has remained: at dawn, if one opens one's eyes, the initial feeling, having cast a glance at one's surroundings, is that yesterday's feelings are totally valid today as well, and that one's past, like a safe gilt-edged stock, has not lost half-a-percent of its value, nothing has changed. All that is new is that one has a past, that one can pronounce the word 'yesterday' intelligibly, but even that rather means that all of one's actions are turned to yesterday, and, if it were up to us, we would press the whole of today into the tight box of yesterday, and the only reason for living in the today is that, due to physical circumstances, one has been squeezed out of yesterday like out of an overcrowded bus: "the next bus is right behind."
On every newly succeeding day one wants to drill back into the layer of preceding days, and it is entirely immaterial that the train is racing along northwards & we are, nonetheless, walking southwards. if the dining car so happens to have been coupled to the train. One senses that one's path is almost physically tracing a wavy resultant on the calendar temperature chart of the days: time, raw time, is always forward, a human being is always facing backward like a stubborn drill, at each & every dawn nearer the sought for past that one wishes were eternal. Life thus makes itself felt as if it was forever running late: one ought to have already been somewhere yesterday, and one can, perchance, reach it only today - that can be seen most clearly from the 'time tests' of lovers: actually, they do not wish to add today's new kiss to yesterday's kiss but to continue yesterday's kiss, or rather to run back to yesterday, though the wind of time is blowing straight against them. The concept of the 'future', the theatrical stunt of 'starting over anew', is no more than a pedagogic trick, alphaist hypocrisy against the one & only omega."
some quotes:
"An embrace is always impossible because it seeks to simultaneously accomplish two gestures which are mutually exclusive: one is preparing the girl's exact mummy case, the other is a demented flinging-around of one's own body; the first feels a need to evenly cover the girl's shoulders and waist like the ritual black moss of Byzantium - the second wishes to tear one's own body into a thousand pieces with the profligate rapture of joy. As one's arms run around the girl's waist like crooked, decayed Iron-Age scissors in the display cases of museums, one's legs and back wish to scatter in the world, to dance at once in a thousand widely separated places. That was not impossible in the rain: one moment the body was clinging together like a snowball in preparation, clutched between the cupped palms of the hands - the next it was exploding like the lines of hanging green ducks in game dealer's shops that looters pillage around in streets forking out of the northern, southern & eastern outskirts."
"To use the language of a pedantic witchdoctor: the old narrative, which utilised the technique of memory, got stuck in the tedium of anemic time-monism; another experimental narrative strives to accomplish the absurdity of placing the various events, totally free of time, as pure spatial elements with the most capricious architectural tricks possible."
"What is exciting about mornings, however, is that nothing at all new starts in them, but the past has remained: at dawn, if one opens one's eyes, the initial feeling, having cast a glance at one's surroundings, is that yesterday's feelings are totally valid today as well, and that one's past, like a safe gilt-edged stock, has not lost half-a-percent of its value, nothing has changed. All that is new is that one has a past, that one can pronounce the word 'yesterday' intelligibly, but even that rather means that all of one's actions are turned to yesterday, and, if it were up to us, we would press the whole of today into the tight box of yesterday, and the only reason for living in the today is that, due to physical circumstances, one has been squeezed out of yesterday like out of an overcrowded bus: "the next bus is right behind."
On every newly succeeding day one wants to drill back into the layer of preceding days, and it is entirely immaterial that the train is racing along northwards & we are, nonetheless, walking southwards. if the dining car so happens to have been coupled to the train. One senses that one's path is almost physically tracing a wavy resultant on the calendar temperature chart of the days: time, raw time, is always forward, a human being is always facing backward like a stubborn drill, at each & every dawn nearer the sought for past that one wishes were eternal. Life thus makes itself felt as if it was forever running late: one ought to have already been somewhere yesterday, and one can, perchance, reach it only today - that can be seen most clearly from the 'time tests' of lovers: actually, they do not wish to add today's new kiss to yesterday's kiss but to continue yesterday's kiss, or rather to run back to yesterday, though the wind of time is blowing straight against them. The concept of the 'future', the theatrical stunt of 'starting over anew', is no more than a pedagogic trick, alphaist hypocrisy against the one & only omega."
May 7, 2022
Who is this Szentkuthy fellow? A bewildering metaphysician, an alchemist . . . a madman or genius? A mad=genieS)
Szentkuthy's prose is an overwhelming rush of wild, oftentimes impenetrable metaphors and audacious leaps of logic, comparisons and sensory gymnastics, the external workings of a genius mind writ large in bold ink seeking to express the inexpressible, to reveal the unknown, the unseen, the otherness of reality through the philosophy of literature: for the reader, the world-thru-words; it is as if he's holding up his modernist optics to our prosaic world, and upon seeing reflected back our perplexed gaze, he flicks through his metaphorical lenses with optometrical thoroughness prompting his unasked question – “Is this clearer? Or is this one clearer? Which metaphor suits you better, this one . . . or this one.”
As clear as Szentkuthy is likely to be concerning his aspirations for PRAE:
“What exists, which is to say Prae itself, is a continual blunder, institutionalized prevarication ('truth'); what is truly exciting, interesting, the one true faith or the actual, by its very nature lies outside any narrative, and that is the inaccessible, the 'Non-Prae,' which bears the same relation to Prae as a tautened bow string does to the arched shaft of the bow. On the statues of Eros the figure of Eros is sometimes shown holding a marble bow; this has no bow string, to be sure, but the bow is nevertheless arched in such a way that the viewer cannot fail to imagine the non-existent string as being there. In the figure of Prae there must, therefore, be some sort of positive signal from which the tensile strength of the 'Non-Prae' that is constantly running in coexistence to Prae can be made perceptible, deducible.
Principle: to utilize the essential impotence of literature with productive optimism as a useful structural factor: to make the constant ghostly absence and its continuo of otherness a harmonious component, to incorporate the 'Non-Prae' into a work's preserve in much the same way as in the Pantheon there used to be a positive altar to the 'unknown god.'” [98]
To describe PRAE as “like nothing else you've ever read” is lazy, without substance – but it is. . . like nothing else. PRAE which attempts to describe the non-existent, the indescribable, is itself indescribable. No matter that great parts of it I found so bewildering as to be incoherent rambling – I perceived an intelligence there beyond my understanding. However it is all redeemed, for there are far more moments of brilliance, moments of illumination where Szentkuthy parts the veil on our reality with his idiopathic gaze, capturing in words the strange 'otherness' normally unseen.
It's a dense, dense 700+ pages. It's great, but I've warned you.
Szentkuthy's prose is an overwhelming rush of wild, oftentimes impenetrable metaphors and audacious leaps of logic, comparisons and sensory gymnastics, the external workings of a genius mind writ large in bold ink seeking to express the inexpressible, to reveal the unknown, the unseen, the otherness of reality through the philosophy of literature: for the reader, the world-thru-words; it is as if he's holding up his modernist optics to our prosaic world, and upon seeing reflected back our perplexed gaze, he flicks through his metaphorical lenses with optometrical thoroughness prompting his unasked question – “Is this clearer? Or is this one clearer? Which metaphor suits you better, this one . . . or this one.”
As clear as Szentkuthy is likely to be concerning his aspirations for PRAE:
“What exists, which is to say Prae itself, is a continual blunder, institutionalized prevarication ('truth'); what is truly exciting, interesting, the one true faith or the actual, by its very nature lies outside any narrative, and that is the inaccessible, the 'Non-Prae,' which bears the same relation to Prae as a tautened bow string does to the arched shaft of the bow. On the statues of Eros the figure of Eros is sometimes shown holding a marble bow; this has no bow string, to be sure, but the bow is nevertheless arched in such a way that the viewer cannot fail to imagine the non-existent string as being there. In the figure of Prae there must, therefore, be some sort of positive signal from which the tensile strength of the 'Non-Prae' that is constantly running in coexistence to Prae can be made perceptible, deducible.
Principle: to utilize the essential impotence of literature with productive optimism as a useful structural factor: to make the constant ghostly absence and its continuo of otherness a harmonious component, to incorporate the 'Non-Prae' into a work's preserve in much the same way as in the Pantheon there used to be a positive altar to the 'unknown god.'” [98]
To describe PRAE as “like nothing else you've ever read” is lazy, without substance – but it is. . . like nothing else. PRAE which attempts to describe the non-existent, the indescribable, is itself indescribable. No matter that great parts of it I found so bewildering as to be incoherent rambling – I perceived an intelligence there beyond my understanding. However it is all redeemed, for there are far more moments of brilliance, moments of illumination where Szentkuthy parts the veil on our reality with his idiopathic gaze, capturing in words the strange 'otherness' normally unseen.
It's a dense, dense 700+ pages. It's great, but I've warned you.
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August 15, 2022In the early 30s, when European modernism was purging itself of curves, colors, kitsch, and all things feminine, Szentkuthy composed this insane and structurally impossible novel combining modern aesthetics with fashion, shopping, chintzy resorts, sex appeal, hypothetical churches, and lesbianism.
November 13, 2021
"squirming compromises and awkward audacities...that only so called modernist & esthete patients (read:readers) who were anyway already brimming with faith in the reality of all sorts of metaphors.." seems to me a pretty good quote as a description of the book that in struggling and failing to express the inexpressible with an overabundance of psychedelic metaphores and analogies and partially cryptic digressions of philosopic, scientific, artistic etc nature, turns out to be at the same time exciting (occasionally) and avant-garde but also boring and clumsy.
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